


Sixth Borough

by bookhousegirl



Series: Bay State [3]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Boston Bruins, Light Angst, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, One Shot, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 08:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12931644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhousegirl/pseuds/bookhousegirl
Summary: But it was Thanksgiving, two years ago, after those failed attempts by Frank to make something happen at Six Flags and the Cape, when Jimmy finally started to thaw. When they talked in hushed voices in their childhood beds, separated by walls from East Longmeadow to Dorchester, and Frank thought for the first time that Jimmy might see they were the same. On the cusp of something good, and both of them right there with it.Frank and Jimmy, out of Boston, out of their depths, on Thanksgiving Eve.





	Sixth Borough

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the shootout between Boston and New Jersey on 11/22. The game was on the road, and the day before Thanksgiving, so there’s no way that Frank and Matt would’ve stayed afterwards, but for the sake of the story please just pretend.
> 
> Thanks for reading about these continually struggly boys.

 

***

 

So they end up in a 24-hour diner over in Jersey City after that atrocious shoot-out, the three of them, Boston’s past and present whipping boys.

 

Frank expected something different. Something more like the diner in Jimmy’s parents’ neighborhood where they would go before crowded Sunday suppers, that served slightly soggy white toast but perfectly crisp potatoes, and had a broken clock on the grease-stained wall. Some place a little banged up and cash-only. More like them.

 

Then again, Jimmy always did like to show off, liked to act like he was just a little better than he actually was. Not a bad thing, Frank supposes, as he slides into the tan leather booth and decides immediately on an item called the South of the Border burger. Jimmy winds a gray cashmere scarf from around his neck and reaches for the menu. His fingers bump the back of Frank’s hand. When Frank meets his gaze, they both try not to smile. It feels too early in the night for that.

 

“Look at us three,” Matt announces. He’s saying it in that way, like he’s so damn pleased with everything. Like everything has turned out exactly the way he planned it. “Bought out.” He points to Jimmy, and Jimmy sticks his tongue out. “Healthy scratch.” He points to himself and then to Frank.

 

“Fuck you. I wasn’t healthy scratched.”

 

“Fuck you, you are basically every other night. As much as I am. Don’t kid yourself, Frank.”

 

“God shut up.” Jimmy puts his menu down when the server approaches and orders a Corona and a gyro salad. “I didn’t invite you out for a pity party.”

 

“Sorry,” Frank mumbles, and it’s the first thing he’s said to Jimmy since they were both hauled by the ref to the penalty box, mouthing obscenities through weird, half-cocked smiles.

 

Jimmy sighs and folds his hand on the cherry wood table. His nails look nice. Cleaned up, Frank notices. “I sympathize. I do. But I also aggressively do not want to hear it. You’ve got each other to whine to. I’m trying to keep my career here.” He kicks Frank’s ankle lightly under the table until Frank uncrosses his feet and settles his Chuck Taylors against Jimmy’s loafers.

 

It’s a Jimmy apology: half-assed but good enough. For what it’s worth Frank takes it and both he and Matt cool it with the Bruins complaints. There are enough to go around these days, from all of them, and so many other, better things to talk about. Good things like baby Ivy and Jimmy meeting up with Kevin for brunch in the city and Frank’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving.

 

“Cool if I swing by tomorrow?” he asks, playing with the screw-top on the pepper shaker.

 

Jimmy’s face registers surprise. “You’re not going home?”

 

“No, I am going home. I mean - wait.” He puts down the pepper and leans back. “What do _you_ mean?”

 

“Everybody, well, not the whole fam obviously, but my parents and sisters and their families are coming here since Kev and I are both here now.”

 

The food arrives then, and Jimmy digs into his salad and Matt chews loudly on his lox bagel, and the activity prevents Frank from saying something colossally stupid. It’s not like they have an anniversary, not like they’re even anything real. But it was Thanksgiving, two years ago, after those failed attempts by Frank to make something happen at Six Flags and the Cape, when Jimmy finally started to thaw. When they talked in hushed voices in their childhood beds, separated by walls from East Longmeadow to Dorchester, and Frank thought for the first time that Jimmy might see they were the same. On the cusp of something good, and both of them right there with it. Maybe it’s more than the killer Italian desserts that make Thanksgiving the best.

 

After the talking and the eating, Matt ducks out to go back to his hotel. “Be good, kids,” he tells them, and then he whispers in Jimmy’s ear and hugs him hard. When it’s finally just them, instead of going back to Jimmy’s right away, they wait in line for organic ice cream at a food truck.

 

“What’re you having?” asks Jimmy as they approach the front of the line.

 

Frank moves from side to side to see the listed flavors on a single laminated sheet. “Malt chip?”

 

“That’s what I was going to get.” Jimmy frowns. “It’s your first time here. I’ll change.”

 

“My second choice was Thai tea.”

 

“Okay,” Jimmy says agreeably, and he orders malt chip and Thai tea in sugar cones and knocks against Frank as he hands over a twenty.

 

They walk to the edge of a small park, no bigger than two square city blocks on each side. It’s cold and the ice cream is delicious but makes Frank even colder as he sits down for a minute. “You remembered our ordering thing,” he says after waiting a minute. Maybe it’s not something to bring up on a night like this.

 

“What?”

 

“You know. Where we both always want the same thing, but one of us changes so we can share.”

 

Jimmy regards his ice cream and doesn’t look at Frank. “I guess I did.”

 

“So are you gonna share with me?”

 

Jimmy gives him a cool look from under his flat brimmed Devils snapback and sits down. “You always get your way,” he says with a head shake, like he’s fighting against a truth he doesn’t want to be reminded of. He tilts his cone towards Frank and watches, not blinking, when Frank takes a long, exaggerated lick of the milky sweet ice cream.

 

Frank leans in quickly and presses his lips to Jimmy’s, tasting sugar and cold, and whispers, “Only when you let me,” against Jimmy’s mouth.

 

There’s no kiss back, but Jimmy gives him a barely-there smile. Maybe doing the ordering thing was an accident, or a reflex etched into his brainware, the way you can rattle off your best friend’s phone number even when you haven’t called it in years, since Jimmy doesn’t ask to share Frank’s malt chip.

 

Still. Frank’s happy it happened. If it was an accident, that’s fine. He’s oddly delighted and can’t stop smiling once they’re in the uber, thinking what it means to be Jimmy’s reflex.

  
***

Jimmy’s apartment has _everything._ Not that his own place back in Boston is some sort of dump. It’s comfortable. It feels lived in, with magazines and random napkins and game controllers strewn about the living room, and Austin’s fifty pairs of shoes stacked by the door. Nothing in its proper place but that’s what makes it just right.

 

There’s something about New York though, or New Jersey that’s almost New York, that makes people like Jimmy seem as though they’ve lost all ability to be self-sufficient, even though everything is perfectly organized and shockingly clean. Frank peers into a stainless steel fridge that has a separate compartment for Jimmy’s bottles of Sam and Brooklyn Lager. The first two shelves are full of stacked yogurt cups and chopped up fruit for smoothies. Frank expected more plastic takeout containers and grocery store brand boxes of spaghetti. This place looks set up by magic.

 

“Do you want something for your face?” Jimmy asks. He pulls a folded towel from a kitchen drawer and pushes a button for ice cubes.

 

Frank shakes his head and moves toward the couch. “Is this yours?”

 

“Well it’s in my apartment right?”

 

“I’ve never seen it before.” Frank tosses off his jacket and kicks off his shoes. The couch is sleek, or maybe slick, so that Frank can’t sink into it. After sliding around for a few awkward seconds, he decides to tuck his legs underneath him.

 

Jimmy laughs and hands him one of the bottles of Sam from the special fridge drawer. “You should use this anyway,” he instructs and presses the bunched-up kitchen towel to Frank’s cheek.

 

“Yours isn’t bad,” says Frank. He touches Jimmy’s face and strokes Jimmy’s beard. He wants to do more, suddenly they’re back to the beginning, back in time two years and stuck. This whole night has felt like holding in a breath and not letting it out.

 

“What’re we even doing,” says Jimmy with an almost-laugh, not asking a question and reading Frank’s mind. “Do you want to talk about it? How things are going? I don’t know what you want me to say about the Bruins.”

 

“I don’t want you to say anything about the Bruins.”

 

“No, I meant about you. And what you’re going through with them.”

 

“I’m not going through anything.” When he sees Jimmy’s unimpressed face, he bites out, “I’m not.”

 

Jimmy takes the kitchen towel back and touches Frank’s nose with the tip of his finger. Through the numbness, the nothingness, Frank can’t really feel it, but he knows Jimmy just did it. “You’re not Frankie if you’re not scoring out there,” Jimmy tells him, and there’s more kindness than before.

 

“I’m Frankie everywhere.” He says it to be obstinate. He’s ignoring the opening he’s being given, to talk about it. After a long pause he reveals, “They told me I need to become more defensively responsible. I need to round out the other aspects of my game. Like, learn to be an energy guy or something. I’ve tried.”

 

“I know you’ve heard the line a thousand times. It’s not hard to make it. It’s hard to stay.” Jimmy says it calmly, like he’s giving a lecture to a bunch of rookies. Like he’s not talking about their past, or their right here, right now. Or their future.

 

Frank’s eyes flash anger again and he’s suddenly charged up. From hitting the crossbar in the shootout, from the fight, from being here in this sterile apartment in Jersey City. “We both made it. But I’m staying,” he answers, with more cruelty than he intends.

 

“Me too,” says Jimmy, and Frank wants to punch him.

 

“Is this a fight now?” he demands. “A real fight?” Somehow that would be worse than what happened on the ice tonight.

 

“No. I don’t want to fight, Frank. I’m just tired.”

 

For a minute Jimmy is quiet and soft, and he looks like the guy Frank remembers goofing around with at practice. How they used to steal in for burgers late at JM Curley and laugh loudly while drinking cheap crappy lite beer in the grandstand at Fenway. The guy who shined himself up when the occasion called for it because he still had too much to prove to the world, but never forgot where he came from. Frank feels his stomach twist and he reaches out for Jimmy’s hand. “I’ve missed you,” he says, voice husky with emotion. “It kind of sucks without you.”

 

“Yeah,” Jimmy agrees, and it’s the first time this whole damn night, maybe the first time since the buyout, that Frank feels they’re right there on the same page. “Missed you too.”

 

“You didn’t act like it. You hit me,” Frank pouts, attempting a look that used to _do it_ for Jimmy all the time.

 

It works. Jimmy and his big body close the space between them and he cradles the back of Frank’s head with his huge hand to fit their mouths together. It’s a good kiss and Frank wants to sink into it and live there for a while.

 

“You hit me first,” Jimmy says back, after they pull apart. He rests his forehead against Frank’s and his eyes are closed.

 

Frank smiles. “Doesn’t work that way.”

 

“For us it does. You always come at me first.”

 

“It’s what I know.” Frank shrugs. It’s one of his strengths. When things don’t go his way, try harder. When he gets sent down, wear his Bruins jersey every day and work harder. At this point, he’s pretty sure he can outwork anybody on anything. “I don’t know what else to do.”

 

“Hey,” Jimmy turns to him, with his unfairly pretty eyes and enviously long lashes. “I’m beat. Is it okay if we just sleep? Can we do that?”

 

Frank takes the offered hand, of course he does. Jimmy’s bedroom is in equal parts devoid of personality and also stunning. There’s a large window on the far wall where the lights of the city across the river come through. It’s not his style, but he sees why Jimmy picked it. Why he likes it.

 

“Jimmy,” he says quietly, while Jimmy pulls back the down comforter. “I think maybe I should head out.”

 

Jimmy nods. “You flying tomorrow?”

 

“No. Uh - the train.” Frank just made that up, but if he has to travel on his own on Thanksgiving, all the way back to Massachusetts, he prefers the train.

 

“Cool.” Jimmy walks around the bed to hug him by the window and Frank melts into him. “Everything’s gonna be alright. You know that, right?”

 

“Yeah. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, though,” he admits.

 

“But it will be.” Jimmy cracks a smile and Frank wants to kiss him again, but he doesn’t.

 

There’s a drawer in the kitchen just like one in Frank’s apartment. Full of junk like random postcards from aunts and uncles vacationing in Aruba and saved soy sauce packets. Magnets and chopsticks and pens pilfered from hotel rooms. Jimmy has only lived here since the end of the summer, but the drawer contains so much stuff. It’s as if he made twice the effort to build it all up, making a useless space seem full.

 

Finally Frank closes his hand around what he was searching for, a flimsy pad of post-it notes. He uncaps the pen, from the Westin in Chicago, with his teeth, and is about to scribble a message when his eyes are drawn to the edge of a polaroid photo.

 

It’s the shirt he recognizes in the picture first, a faded orange tank with the sleeves ripped off, that he bought for Jimmy as a joke on one of their trips, to show off Jimmy’s hulking arms and his smooth shoulders. Frank definitely took this photo, because Jimmy’s shoulders are on full display, tanned from the Cape sun and speckled brick red, like the eggs of a swallow he found while climbing the front tree in his parents’ yard as a kid. When his mom found the eggs she yelled, even though he had created a nest out of blankets from his room for them. She made him put them back and he kissed each one before sliding them into the cradle made of twigs and twine and grass.

 

He lay kiss upon kiss on those shoulders too. In the last two years, too many times to bother counting, and he’s not sure which thing he cherished more. The delicate tiny eggs that he wanted to nurture or the freckled, worshipped shoulders of Jimmy Hayes.

 

Frank’s own face is blurry and smashed into Jimmy’s elbow from their spot on the bed, as he attempted to hold the unwieldy 80s camera out for a selfie. Jimmy’s eyes are half-closed, sleep drunk, or sex drunk, or maybe both. They look happy. Without even knowing what they did, if they took a drive on Route 28 through the towns or ate salty, greasy clams by the water or ordered two flavors of ice cream to share even though they both wanted the same thing, Frank knows it must have been a good day.

 

Carefully, he extracts the polaroid and puts back the post-its and the other junk. _Sometimes we want the same thing,_ he scrawls on the back, in his handwriting that looks like he’s in the eighth grade. He affixes the photo to the fridge with one of those shiny silver clip magnets, next to a dry cleaner’s receipt and a business card for a new Sicilian restaurant in Dorchester. Occasionally, everyone needs a reminder of who they are, where they come from.

 

While waiting for his uber to take him to the hotel in midtown that he just reserved at an obnoxiously high nightly rate, he checks his phone. The team chat is blowing up with Thanksgiving plans and who’s bringing what beer to Torey’s.

 

He closes his eyes and breathes through his nose to slow his heart rate. He’s going to get shit for joining in late now that his plans are screwed.

 

_What do you guys need me to bring?_

 

 _Thought you were doing your own thing_ is Torey’s rapid fire response.

 

Frank scrubs a hand over his face and presses the little photo of a baby fox that he has saved as Torey. “I _am_ doing the family thing. But I’ll come by after.”

 

Because he’s kind of a jerk, Torey says, “Well this is sort of late for an RSVP. You gotta bring those cookies you’re always talking about to make up for putting me out like this.”

 

“Done,” Frank replies before Torey has barely finished his sentence and Torey laughs. “Thank you,” he adds.

 

“Not a problem, man. Just messing around with you.”

 

Frank is about to say something chirpy back but his phone buzzes with a text alert and he swipes from his call to Torey to check. It’s from Jimmy.

 

_Happy Thanksgiving Frank. Save some of your mom’s mashed potatoes for me._

 

It’s unexpected, definitely, after all they’ve been through tonight. Last year Jimmy took home two tupperware containers of the mashed potatoes and let Frank kiss him outside on the street, by his car, the tips of their noses going cold and their breath making clouds in the air. He’s about to respond, to force himself to be equally easy breezy when Torey’s voice cuts through to ask, “Everything okay Frank? How’s the face?”

 

Frank laughs and gingerly touches his cheek and the side of his nose. They both feel a little puffy but not terrible. The ice probably did help. In the car, the glass of the window is cool against the bruises that must be forming where Jimmy hit him. They’ll roll into their respective family Thanksgivings looking like a bunch of badasses. That’s what he’s going to text back, he decides. When he gets around to it.

 

The city, New York, starts to open up before him and he turns away. “Actually not too bad. I look kind of awesome. It hardly hurts at all,” he says, and relaxes finally into the thrum of the car and the dark.

 

***

**Author's Note:**

> [For your visual reference](http://1.cdn.nhle.com/bruins/images/upload/gallery/2017/11/877605122_slide.jpg)


End file.
